#124. Kenneth Cook, ‘Wake in Fright’ (1961) and Michael Crichton, ‘Rising Sun’ (1992).

Is it possible to make good art out of stereotypes? To find an answer to this age-old question, let’s examine these two case studies. Both portray certain types of real people (rural Australians, Japanese businessmen) in a negative light, motivated by contempt (Cook) or anxiety (Crichton).

Cook’s debut tells the story of John Grant, a snobbish schoolteacher in the Outback of Australia. Grant tries to return to Sydney for his vacation but gambles away all his money in “the Yabba”, a dusty provincial town. Down on his luck, he gets embroiled in the lives of various local grotesques: a drunken doctor, a promiscuous young woman, and a gang of beer-swilling kangaroo hunters.

Crichton’s novel was written just after the “Japan as No. 1” era of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Wall Street bankers assumed that the Japanese economic boom would continue forever and dominate the entire world (they love to assume such things, don’t they?) The “lost decade” of the 1990s put an end to such grandiose fantasies and fears, and Crichton’s novel survives as an odd relic of the period. It tells the story of a Los Angeles policeman who investigates the murder of an American woman in a high-rise owned by a Japanese company whose parties are a bit wilder and nastier than the wholesome Christmas shindig across town at Nakatomi Plaza.

Both works, Cook’s and Crichton’s, were heavily criticized for their ethnic stereotyping in book form. Movie adaptations, both largely faithful to the originals, also earned critical scorn. The 1971 movie of Wake in Fright bombed in Australia, and the few people who saw it were known to stand up and shout, “That’s not us!” Likewise, Crichton’s novel and its subsequent film adaptation have been criticized as racist towards Japanese or even East Asians in general. Neither criticism is meritless, and nobody would call these novels flawless. But both Cook and Crichton are talented, sincere writers, and so their stereotyping is different and more nuanced than, say, a vial of pure poison like the Nazi film, Jew Süss. The core difference is that Jew Süss is uses stereotypes for political propaganda, while Cook and Crichton use stereotypes to create archetypes.

In Cook and Crichton’s works, the boorish Australians and deceptive Japanese slowly inch away from the stereotype into the archetype: specific personas with universal human resonance, used as elements in an artistic structure. Cook’s spiteful hatred of the Aussie rednecks turns, in the infamous kangaroo hunt, into a kind of holy terror before the endemic violence of mankind. Crichton’s worry about the conniving, hive-minded Japanese corporation eating America’s lunch becomes a tribute to discipline and agility in the fast-moving global economy. Such is the moral complexity of art that neither writer might have articulated their visions if they hadn’t been able to start in fairly crude oversimplifications.

Instead of reflexively judging artworks and looking for reasons to get offended (or to paternalistically “protect” others who might be), we ought to encourage artists to explore stereotypes without fear. Simply by representing stereotypes using the normal sensitivity of real artists towards any subject under their gaze, they can transcend them. Real art, no matter how partial and biased, tends towards universality. Of course, a world governed by free speech results in quite a few horrible, offensive, and worthless pieces. But such bad pieces tend to be created and shared anyway, even in a high-censorship environment, and the cost is well worth it for the sake of boosting creativity.

First-world critics who are completely allergic to stereotypes often live in a cultural bubble. They can imagine a wealthy white American’s stereotypical treatment of a Hispanic immigrant, but they couldn’t imagine a Hispanic immigrant’s stereotype of a wealthy American, or a Nigerian’s stereotype of an African-American, or any number of ready-made images that crisscross the globe in fabulously intricate ways. Of course it’s a noble goal to treat all ethnic groups with fairness and savviness. But it’s also a privilege that comes with a cosmopolitan upbringing. This is one reason why literary prizewinners, for all their ethnic and gender diversity, increasingly come from wealthy backgrounds and graduate from the same few Ivy League schools and prestigious MFA programs.

Avoiding the rush to judgment helps us appreciate art that is more raw and real, less refined and self-conscious, and ultimately more alive than the high-minded intellectualized nonsense that often passes these days for morally benevolent art. Cook’s and Crichton’s novels belong in this category of raw, real works. In ten years, maybe it’ll be an African writer’s stereotype about Indians or a Palestinian’s stereotype of Iranians.

When you see a stereotype in a work of art, the best question is not “Is this stereotype offensive?” but rather “What purpose does this stereotype serve?” Is it propaganda, cynical opportunism, a private grudge?; Or is it the undermining of the stereotype, or the painful birth of an archetype?